


Love At First Light

by Calchexxis



Series: Flashbangs & Frag Grenades [2]
Category: League of Legends
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Explosions, F/F, Jinx is crazy, Lux is Crazier, Manic Disaster Lesbians, Meet-Cute, They're Both Crazy, What Did You Expect, it's cute by their standards okay?, lightcannon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-18
Updated: 2021-03-18
Packaged: 2021-03-27 06:14:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30118404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Calchexxis/pseuds/Calchexxis
Summary: Lux is in the middle of a covert operation when an explosion interrupts her and throws both her mission—and the rest of her life—into disarray.
Relationships: Luxanna "Lux" Crownguard/Jinx
Series: Flashbangs & Frag Grenades [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2216451
Comments: 6
Kudos: 31





	Love At First Light

**Author's Note:**

> Wuh-oh, here we go again. Prequel to _Wherefore Cometh Light_ , and chronologically where our two manic disasters first meet.

It started with an explosion. 

The seventy-second spire of Piltover rocked, nearly knocking Lux from her perch as she spied through a window at a trio of figures in hoods and robes—as if they were trying to advertise that they were cultists—bargaining with a Demacian official on business in the mechanized city. The reinforced glass pane crazed with fractures as Lux pulled back and pinned herself to the outer wall as her targets suddenly looked up around frantically.

“Damn it,” Lux cursed softly as she looked around. “They were just getting to the good part, too.”

She had more than enough rope to hang them by already, of course, but a little while longer into that conversation and Lux was certain she could have uncovered where the illicit magical trade was flowing _from._

Noxus, probably, but there was a chance it was originating in the trade cities surrounding Shurima.

Now though…

Smoke was billowing up around Lux, and she forced back a cough as she tugged the cowl of her spellthief’s coat over her head and tugged the fabric mask over her face. The enchantments were technically meant to keep toxic gases from affecting her, but it worked just as well for smoke. Nothing she could do about it getting in her eyes though, all she could do was squint and try to start sidling around the outer edges of the spire.

What kind of maniac bombs an eighty-story tower? If Lux were estimating right, the explosion would have gone off around the forty-fifth or -sixth floors. Screwing her eyes shut, she rolled back the intel for this spire in her mind. That floor would be…

Lux’s eyes shot open. That was a level committed to experimental hextechnology; not strictly weapons as most weren’t even finished products, but it was all patent-pending and potentially dangerous! This wasn’t just a mad bombing then.

It was a _heist._

Another detonation split the air followed by high, psychotic laughter as a stray rocket shot out from somewhere in the lower levels of the spire tower—no, not just a rocket, there was someone _riding it._

“Well that’s one way to make an exit,” Lux said dryly as the rocket impacted the next building over. 

The figure who had been riding it staggered drunkenly out of the rubble, slightly singed but otherwise no worse for the wear, and on a whim Lux flicked her fingers, oscillating the light frequencies around her eyes to bend them and give her a close-up of the ‘criminal genius’ whose apparent escape plan involved high explosives and a reckless disregard for physical safety.

They—no, she—looked like a wild woman. Short, rail-thin, and pale, her arms were corded with lean, acrobatic muscle wearing nothing more than a variety of improbably positioned belts, straps, and bandoleers of ammunition that barely preserved her modesty. She looked like someone animated a lion-tamer’s whip made of bullets, gave it a penchant for collateral damage, and knocked off for lunch.

Everything about her screamed ‘strung out, high-energy maniac’ and for some reason that tickled Lux, especially as she shook her head, sending her ankle-length, electric blue braids flailing, before pulling out contraption that looked very much like a rotating, three-barreled chaingun, only made by someone who only heard a vague description of the weapon and decided to wing it from there.

“And there’s the fuzz,” Lux said, leaning in a little to watch as the mechanized security of Piltover started swarming towards the young woman.

Part of her thought she should go back to trying to salvage the espionage case she’d been working but, honestly, she had what she needed, plus a little more, and it’s not like anyone would know that she’d decided to slack off the last ten percent of her mission.

Besides, she was kind of invested in the chaos below, now.

Six of the robotic security guards charged the criminal with stun batons telescoping from their arms and were immediately mowed down by precise, high-velocity rounds.

“Armor-piercing?” Lux muttered as she leaned in from her perch, focusing her viewing iris in on the machines briefly to examine the damage.

Definitely armor-piercing. Their dense armored bodies were punched clean through, shredding the delicate hextech circuitry inside in multiple places.

One of the large units was clambering up the side of the building the criminal had chosen to fight on. It was stooped and simian, and clearly had heavier front-facing armor than the small, bipedal units. Shots rang like silver bells off of its face and shoulders as it began heaving its immense bulk up to the rooftop. The gun-toting bomber gave the simian enforcer an exaggerated roll of her eyes, a clear ‘ _really?_ ’ expression, that earned a giggle from Lux.

Then she dropped the nose of her gun, quick-drew something that looked like a handgun and—

_ZZZAP_

Lux jumped, almost losing her footing as the weapon the woman used emitted a sound like a main energy transformer detonating. There was a blinding flash of light and the simian enforcer was suddenly wracked with wild arcs of arcane lightning as it spasmed and twitched, crushing its own handholds on the roof edge in the process, and robbing it of its traction.

Like a massive, old-growth tree, the enormous enforcer pitched backward and fell, descending into the fog beneath Piltover; maybe falling all the way to Zaun.

More of the bipedal units fell in a hail of gunfire as the criminal mopped up the remaining squads as they tried in vain to reach her. They were the first but they wouldn’t be the last, and Lux had no doubt that soon the vaunted Sheriff of Piltover would make an appearance, assuming the little madwoman below her didn’t make good on her escape first.

Lux was about to kip up from the spire-edge and leave when her iris caught one final thing.

The criminal reached into her pouch and drew something out, which she checked over scrupulously. It was a sphere of impossibly intricate hextech circuitry, and to the untrained eye it would look like any other piece of over-engineered junk Piltover tended to produce. Lux, however, happened to know that it was actually a next-generation, all-purpose, hextech security bypass made with ancient and currently forbidden magic sequences.

Or, in other words, it was the ultimate hextech hacking tool.

“Oh you’re _kidding me_ ,” Lux spat.

It also happened to be the exact item that the cultists had been bargaining for. Meaning that if the thief made off with that tech then a solid half of Lux’s mission would be for nothing. They’d get to hang one corrupt administrative official and then be back at square one.

No, worse, the Radiant Ones would probably be forced to bargain with the insipid little krug! He’d get off free and all it would cost him is information!

“Crap!” Lux scrambled to her feet as the criminal started to sprint across the rooftop.

Lux ran parallel to her, bending light into the magical threads of her spellthief garb to bend light around her, keeping her invisible without taking any focus beyond what was needed to feed a consistent trickle of mana into the runes etched into the weave of her clothing. 

“Damn it, damn it, damn it!” Lux nearly bit through her lip as raged boiled in her stomach. It would’ve been easy to take that blue-haired nightmare pixie down while she’d been fighting the security bots, but Lux hadn’t seen a reason to interfere!

How was she supposed to know that that nutbar hadn’t just broken into the experimental labs, but actually busted into the most secure vault they had?!

Who does that?! That’s _crazy!_

Lux reached the edge of the spire and rather than take a turn, she sprinted up one of the mechanical gargoyles marking the corner of the building, kicked off from its head, and at the same time briefly threw out a gravity negation spell, multiplying the force of her jump by several times before pushing out a pulse of kinetic force behind her to send her rocketing towards the girl.

She was still silent. She had the element of surprise! Snapping her staff out, Lux cast a bolt of binding light right where the bomber would be in two, on—

“Ooh! Lucky penny!”

Lux’s jaw dropped in the split-second that she had to react as the thief came to a comically dead stop in the middle of running from an explosive heist to scoop up a copper penny from the rooftop.

The binding bolt hit the bare metal rooftop, fizzling out to nothing, and Lux struck the same spot a breath later right where the thief would have been _if she were sane and had any sense at all._

“CRAP!” Lux recovered just in time to tuck and roll, hissing as she bruised her ribs and shoulder on the rooftop coming to a stop.

“Huh, wow, I guess they’re just cutting out the middleman and just shooting _people_ at me now, huh?” The manic thief grinned ear-to-ear as she flipped the coin that had conveniently saved her from getting nailed to the floor.

Lux staggered to her feet, staffing angled up and pointed at the thief’s pale, narrow chest.

“O~kay, that… that didn’t go how I thought it would,” Lux said breathlessly as she forced her aching body to stop shaking from the impact of her fall. “But uh, yeah, I’m gonna need that sphere back.”

“Nah.”

That lightning-gun was out and up before Lux could blink—drawn so fast that Lux barely had time to snarl out her barrier spell and send a spiraling mobius strip of light snapping out behind her, leaving behind a curved sphere of pure light around Lux, just as that deafening noise detonated from the barrel of the gun.

The shot blew through Lux’s barrier with a whipcrack of magical discharge and sent wild spasms through her limbs. The barrier had taken the lion’s share of the oomph out of the shot, but Lux still staggered backward, dazed and reeling from the shock.

She sent a bolt of binding light out in a wild, sorcerous haymaker, as she backpedaled into her returning wheel of barrier energy, letting it impact her and form a new shield.

_Fast—she’s really fast!_

The thief side-stepped the bolt of light before it had even left Lux’s staff, her sharp, springberry-colored eyes reading the angle perfectly as she spun, holstering the lightning-gun in that same fluid motion that she reached for a weapon strapped to her back and brought it up braced on her thin shoulder, and Lux froze.

“Is… is that a rocket launcher?” Lux asked as the claptrap weapon’s cartoonishly shark-shaped mouth popped open to vomit out the tip of a high explosive.

“Maybe.” The thief grinned as she stuck her tongue out of the side of her mouth, screwed one eye shut, and took aim. “What’s it to ya?”

“Well it’s just—you’re only about ten feet away from me,” Lux said uneasily. “If you fire that thing, we both go.”

There was a brief pause as the thief cocked her head to the side and visibly measured the distance between the two of them. Her eyes traced a line from Lux’s feet to her own, and then back before squinting, pursing her lips, and furrowing her brow in an expression of deep, exaggerated concentration.

“E~h… I’d say it’s like, eleven feet, _at least,_ ” the thief said after a moment, before going back to aiming her rocket launcher. “It’ll be fine!”

“Woah, woah, woah!” Lux put her hands and backed up a step. “Let’s… let’s talk about this, okay?”

She was crazy. She was completely insane. This wasn’t a thief, this was a madwoman! She probably broke into that vault figuring it would have something shiny and valuable, and just grabbed the first thing she saw! The only thing this dumbass really had going for her was an absurd amount of _luck_.

“I dunno, that sounds a lot like not blowing stuff up, and I don’t know if I’m ready for that kind of lifestyle change,” the thief remarked as she took an absurd step forward.

“Do you even know what that thing does?” Lux asked, pointing at her waist pouch.

The thief raised an eyebrow but didn’t look away from Lux. Crap. So they weren’t _that_ stupid. Okay, whatever, she could work with this. She could do this!

“Why? Is it valuable?” The thief asked dryly.

Lux didn’t bother hiding her smirk since her mouth was covered in a mask. She knew it. This idiot was a weapon-crazed bomber! She probably figured there would be a weapon in that vault, and the hilarious thing was that if she had chosen almost any other vault there might have been! 

“Sort of?” Lux said, measuring her tone carefully. “It’s a piece of highly specialized equipment for auto-programming high-end hextech circuitry, honestly it doesn’t do much on its own.”

Don’t move. Don’t blink. Don’t breathe. Don’t give anything away. Lux forced herself to keep her body relaxed as she waited to see how her lie settled. She took great pride in her poker face, and it had gotten her out of a surprising number of jams; it could get her out of this one too.

No reaction. Time to double down.

Slowly, Lux put her hands up to her cowl and drew it back, letting her long, golden hair flow free as she tugged her mask down.

“I’m serious,” she lied smoothly. “That thing is valuable to about twenty people _total_ in all of Piltover and maybe a dozen more outside of it. It’ll never sell on the black market, but I’ve got two hundred gold here—” Lux palmed out her purse and held it out. It really did have the amount she claimed “—and you can have it if you give that back, and then you can go and we’ll call it a wash, deal?”

The thief looked pensive for a moment, an oddly muted look on such an expressive face, and for a moment, Lux felt her breath catch. The thief was actually… kind of pretty. Not traditionally. She was too tall—almost a head taller than Lux—and too thin. She had too many scars and pockmarks that were probably caused by her own self-inflicted collateral damage as much as by her enemies’ weapons. But she also had bright eyes and full lips that turned up in a cute cupid’s-bow, and just… killer dimples when she smiled, which was what she was doing now.

Crap. Focus, Lux.

“Two hundred? Lame!” The thief groaned, and yet she was still smiling as she flicked her hand and produced the sphere from… somewhere, in an impressive bit of sleight of hand. “I was hoping for a few grand at least!”

“I know,” Lux said, trying not to breathe a sigh of relief. “But it’s all I have, and I could promise more but, let’s be honest, there’s no way you can trust me to come up with it, so what do you say?”

“Nah.”

Lux’s jaw dropped as the thief casually flung the orb over her shoulder and off the edge of the building, and for once her brilliant mind _utterly failed her_. If the bypass was destroyed then there went half a year’s worth of investigation! They’d been tracking this deal for months! If the main item on purchase was destroyed then the cult would go underground and it would all have been for nothing!

“NO!” Lux bolted forward as the thief sprinted past her.

Where did it go?! Where had she thrown it?! If she were fast she might be able to catch it in a sweeper spell and— 

Logic reasserted itself seconds later and Lux whipped around, catching a brief glimpse of the thief’s smug, too-wide grin as she palmed the orb out for Lux to see. It had been a trick, more sleight of hand, and worse Lux had _actually fallen for it._

“OH, YOU MISERABLE PIG-TAILED _TROLLOP!_ ” Lux shrieked as she spun on her heel and sprinted after Jinx who was laughing her head off.

The thief pulled her handgun and snapped off a bolt of lightning that Lux, too furious to bother anything more delicate, just brute-forced through, bashing the bolt away with a surge of holothurgic force as she sprinted after the smug little sewer gremlin that had just one-upped her.

“Come’n get me, Blondie!” The thief jeered as she hopped a divide between two buildings, landing with a circus tumble that ended her on her feet without a missed beat.

Lux jumped the gap and shot a bolt of air pressure behind her as she tucked her legs up, letting the pulse buffet her forward. Her ankles screamed as she landed hard on the metal roof, but she kept running. Her cheeks were blazing and she was grinding her teeth so hard she would be surprised if she still had any by the time she caught up with that idiot.

The bypass didn’t even matter anymore. The mission didn’t matter. The half-a-year-long investigation didn’t matter either. All that mattered was that this Zaunite sump-trash dumpster fairy had just gotten one over on Lux in a way no one had ever done before, and she would be _damned_ if she let that go!

The thief was insanely fast. Not just quick on the draw, but actually fast. Her gangly, long-limbed gait ate up the space in front of her, letting her pull ahead even despite Lux’s impressive physical endurance. Not that the thief was any kind of slouch. Lux had to grudgingly admit that they were in fantastic shape despite looking like they subsisted entirely off of stringy rat meat roasted over a hobo fire.

“That the best ya got?!” The thief crowed.

“I’ll show you the best I’ve got!” Lux snarled. 

Lux spun her staff on her palm, capturing power in the vortex before leaping, putting her whole body into a rotation, and hurling out a twisting, pulsating singularity of luminous force. The ball of energy struck the ground several feet in front of the thief, tearing up metal panels from the rooftop with its mere presence and, in that split-second, Lux calculated the next move.

The thief was fast. Fast enough that Lux knew she’d be able to avoid stumbling into the snarling singularity of power she’d cast out, but that wasn’t the point. Left or right? Would she go left or right?

Stupid. That’s stupid. This acrobatic psychopath wouldn’t go in either direction.

She’d go _up._

Time caught up with Lux as she landed and dashed forward, the light binding spell on her lips as Jinx coiled her legs like springs and hopped, spinning her heavy weapon for the momentum as Lux spun up her spell, and let it loose.

“WOOHOO!”

The tower rocked violently with a devastating explosion.

“You. Are. _KIDDING ME!_ ”

Never, in her life, had Lux missed anything three times in a row. Then again she’d never had someone dodge her light binding by firing a rocket launcher under their own feet.

The thief rode the shock wave of the explosion, laughing all the way as Lux’s third light binding sailed off into the distance to twinkle forlornly into nothing, her limber body tracing an arc down towards the nearest building. Shrieking in inchoate fury, Lux bolted straight towards her quarry, kicked off, and as she did she cast three spells in rapid sequence.

Firstly, her gravity negation spell, which sent her sailing forward.

Secondly, she spins around to cast out a pulse of kinetic energy behind her to give her some starting momentum.

Thirdly… 

Lux cycled up the full weight of her power, dumped her mana, and unloaded a blinding, steel-scorching beam of light and sound in the most wasteful way possible, blowing herself backward with the force of a cannonball, and if she got her calculations right then she’d be— 

_WHAM!_

Lux collided with the thief as they met at the nadir of the thief’s descending arc, knocking the breath from Lux’s lungs as the pair of them go tumbling ass over teakettle through the air before landing hard on the next roof over, rolling in a sweaty, tumbling, tangle of limbs and ending with the thief on her back, staring dumbfounded up Lux who had her pinned to the rooftop.

“Got you!” Lux hissed.

The thief just stared; her pretty, berry-colored eyes wide with amazement and her full lips forming a silent ‘o’ of surprise that quickly formed into the biggest, happiest smile that Lux had ever seen on another human being.

And then she started to laugh.

It was a wild noise, all kicking legs and flailing limbs. It was the kind of laugh where you completely lose control and all you can do is just laugh and laugh and laugh until you can’t breathe anymore.

Until you physically can’t laugh anymore.

The weirdest part was that Lux found herself laughing, too. She was laughing! Not smiling and giggling at some stuffed-up Demacian noble’s cretinous joke or politely laughing at the humorous part of a play she had no interest in. She was just _laughing._

It took almost a full minute for the thief to run out of breath, and when she did she went slack against the rooftop with only a high-pitched giggle escaping her every now and again when she got enough air to manage it, and a moment later, she flicked her fingers and produced the sphere.

“Okay, here ya go, Blondie!” She said, still grinning toothily ear-to-ear. “One experimental hextech security bypass! It's all yours!”

Lux blinked at the sphere, then turned to goggle at the thief.

“Just like that?” Lux asked.

“Yeah! You caught me!” She replied brightly. “You win!”

That… that made no sense. Or it did, but only in the way that a five-year-old makes sense of things. It made sense if the whole thing, from the bombing to the threat of explosive death to the slinging of absolutely lethal amounts of gunfire and magic, were all just an elaborate game of tag or chase.

Which apparently… it was.

“Wait,” Lux furrowed her brow and stared at the sphere for a moment before looking back at the thief. “You _knew?_ ”

“Duh.” The thief grinned. “Do I look stupid?”

Of course she knew. Why wouldn’t she know? Lux started laughing again, this time it was a weak, thready thing as she hung her head low, letting it thud against the thief’s bare sternum.

“Woah there, ya gonna buy me dinner first?”

Lux froze, then lifted her head slightly as her cheeks colored. The thief wasn’t exactly what you’d call ‘well-endowed’—or even ‘modestly endowed’—but technically speaking, Lux _had_ just buried her face between the thief’s breasts.

“S-Sorry!” Lux scrambled upright, only belatedly realizing as she did that that left her straddling the thief’s hips, which wasn’t much better.

“Eh, no biggie.” The thief held out the sphere again and, cautiously, Lux plucked it up and turned it over in her hand.

It was the real thing all right. Still intact, too. No damage. All she had to do was return it to the vault and everything would be fine, except suddenly that didn’t seem all that important anymore. Not nearly as important as— 

“What’s your name?” Lux asked, lowering the sphere as she stared down at the thief.

The blue-haired maniac quirked a single, narrow eyebrow up, then smiled that too-wide, too-bright smile again. That was it. That was what Lux had been looking for. This girl—she shone! She was complete chaos! Like a hundred firecrackers going off in a shoebox during a silent auction. She was a supernova caught in the middle of changing its underwear.

She made absolutely no sense and for some reason that made it absolutely _imperative_ that Lux know her name.

“My name?” The thief huffed out a bubbly laugh. “The name’s Jinx! Stands for Jinx!”

“Jinx.” Lux smiled as she rolled the name over her tongue. It was perfect. “I’m Lux.”

“Lux, huh?” Jinx grinned broadly. “Cute name.”

Jinx sat up sharply, startling Lux who tried to back up, but two strong hands found a grip on her hips and anchored her down. Jinx kept Lux firmly in her lap as she was suddenly looming over the Demacian mage. Lux knew, intellectually, that Jinx was taller than she was, but being this close stole her breath from her lungs as Jinx stared down unblinkingly over a deceptively cute button nose, directly into Lux’s eyes.

“You’re cute, too,” Jinx said without a hint of shame.

Lux started to stammer. She started to say something as a red hot blush flashed over her cheeks. Whatever it was, though, was lost, as a pair of cupid’s-bow lips were suddenly crushed against hers. Lux went rigid as Jinx’s fingers dug gently into her waist, and all she could think about was how ridiculously soft those lips really were.

And somewhere in there that Lux couldn’t pinpoint, she’d started to kiss back.

Slowly, Lux looped her arms over Jinx’s shoulders, and Jinx smiled against Lux’s lips as she pushed deeper, demanding more. Lux gave it to her, opening her mouth softly, and letting Jinx probe along her teeth as she traced her hands up Lux’s sides, lingering at her waist before jerking her closer until they flush, and Lux let out what she would deny to her _grave_ was a moan.

This was insane.

Jinx was insane. She was clearly and unabashedly, _criminally_ insane! Literally! She was both a criminal! And insane! Not only that, she and Lux had just finished trying to kill each other and now—!

Lux swallowed thickly as Jinx pulled away, grinning as a fire lit behind those springberry eyes of hers. They were so bright. So painfully bright. Lux couldn’t stop looking at them. She couldn’t look away as Jinx seemed to be gleefully staring straight into Lux’s soul.

“ _That’s my girl._ ” She whispered those three words as she pulled away with kiss-swollen lips that were curved into a face-splitting smile. 

She licked her lips, then licked Lux’s lips, who started again with a high-pitched squeak. 

“Lux.” Jinx said the word like she was tasting it.

Then she shivered, threw her head back, and started laughing spasmodically as she pulled Lux tight to her chest in a crushing hug, burying Lux’s face in the crook of her neck, and through Jinx’s laughter Lux could hear words. Two words. Just two words repeated over and over and over.

“ _FoundherFoundherFoundherFoundherFoundherFoundherFOUNDHER!_ ”

When she pulled away, it was only to keep staring Lux, and to trace long, dextrous fingers, over the lines of Lux’s face like Jinx was trying to memorize her by touch.

“ _I found you,_ ” Jinx hissed through a smile full of gritted teeth.

For some reason, the only thing that Lux could think to say by way of reply was:

“No. I found you.”

If Jinx’s smile could have gotten any wider, it would have split her head in half, but as it was, she smiled so wide that cracks in her lips formed faintly, coloring red lips even redder as her left eye developed a disturbing twitch.

There was something unearthly about that moment; something that Lux couldn’t put a finger on. Jinx had a quality to her that defied everything in Lux’s well-ordered mind to the point that just thinking about the mad thief made Lux’s head spin in a downward spiral until Jinx was all she could think about at all.

Jinx’s smile and her laugh and… and her _everything_ just drowned out every last bit of noise in Lux’s head until it was all just Jinx.

‘ _Maybe I’m going crazy too_ ,’ Lux thought as she smiled wide.

The moment shattered as the sound of sirens in the distance cut the air, and the look of ineffable psychosis on Jinx’s face dissolved into a slack expression of long-suffering resignation.

“Ugh, I hear fat hands and big hats on the wind,” Jinx groaned before fitting her hands directly under Lux’s ass and dead-lifting her up, earning another high squeak as Jinx stood to her full height before setting Lux down on her feet.

When she looked back down at Lux, though, the resignation faded, replaced with a shadow of that obsessive glee, and on a whim of total insanity, Lux shoved the sphere back into Jinx’s hands.

Jinx stared down at the orb in clear surprise.

“Just in case,” Lux said.

Why? Just in case of _what?!_ Just in case she got rightfully caught by the authorities and put in prison? Isn’t that a good thing?!

But there it was again. That smile. Lux’s heart skipped a beat as Jinx snatched the sphere, rolled it expertly over the planes of her hand, then flicked her fingers and made it disappear.

Then she was scooping Lux up, pulling her in, and kissing her with lips that tasted faintly of copper. Jinx gripped her tight, one hand settling between Lux’s shoulders and the other slipping down to grip her by the thigh as she dipped Lux down like she was a princess in a fairy tale.

And despite the gunfire and the sirens, and the fact that the two of them had literally just finished trying to kill each other, and in spite of the fact that Luxanna Crownguard was as close to a Demacian princess as it was possible to be without marrying into the royal family itself… Lux had never felt more like one than she did right then.

Jinx righted her just as suddenly, letting Lux stumble to catch herself and stand upright on wobbly legs. The long-limbed thief stepped back and raked her fingers through her tightly-bound, electric-blue hair, then reached out and put the tip of her finger to Lux’s forehead.

“You,” she said with a smile. “I’ll find you again, Blondie… just you wait.”

Then she was gone, cackling as she dropped over the edge of the building they’d been standing on top of, laughing all the way down, and for some reason that didn’t bother Lux in the slightest. She’d be fine. Lux knew she’d be fine. So instead she just laughed as if Jinx had told her a particularly fine joke before throwing a veil of invisibility over herself, and stepping away from the edge.

Her legs went out from under her a second later as she put her fingers to her lips, trying to hold on to the ghost of those two fierce kisses for just a few seconds longer.

She tasted like blood and gunpowder and smelled like smoke and crude oil.

Lux licked her lips and smiled. Jinx would find her again, she was certain of it, and worse, Lux was looking forward to it. Moreso than she’d looked forward to anything in a long, long time.

By the time Lux got up from her spot in the shadows of that rooftop, the sirens were gone and night had fallen over Piltover. Jinx hadn’t come back, but then, Lux hadn’t really expected her to.

Still invisible, Lux called up a schematic of the city in her mind, turned on her heel, and started skipping towards the nearest aerial hub where she could catch a tram back to her hotel room and start thinking up a plausible explanation for why the Radiant Ones’ investigation they’d spent over six months and an obscene amount of man-hours on was now a complete bust.

Whatever, she’d think of something.

It really didn’t seem all that important anymore.

Nowhere near as important as those three words Jinx had said as she pulled away from their first kiss. Words that were still echoing in Lux’s head as she skipped and occasionally giggled her way towards the trams.

_That’s my girl._


End file.
